Organisational geographies of corporate responsibility: a UK-US comparison of retailers' ethical trading initiatives

Ethical trade, involving corporate codes of conduct for sitesof production, has become a key means through which labour inretailers’ global supply chains is regulated. Yet, thereis evidence to suggest that retail corporations vary markedlyin their approaches to ethical trade and that such variationis shaped, in part, by the national-institutional contexts inwhich retailers are based. This article explores this insightby evaluating the distinct roles played by multi-stakeholderinitiatives for ethical trade in the UK and USA. While the UK'score multi-stakeholder initiative, the Ethical Trading Initiative(ETI), encompasses retailers from a variety of sectors and takesa developmental and continuous learning approach to ethicaltrade, the US multi-stakeholder initiatives are focussed moreon corporate accountability based on compliance monitoring exclusivelyin the clothing sector. Given recent organisational attemptsto foster transnational dialogue between multi-stakeholder initiatives,though, we argue that the precise ways in which national-institutionalcontexts shape retailers’ ethical trading approaches arefluid and mutable. We contribute to the literature on the governanceof global supply chains, retailer power and corporate responsibilityby emphasising the political significance of national-institutionalenvironments. However, in line with notions of relational economicgeography, we understand these national-institutional environmentsas active and dynamic contexts, and accentuate the coalitionalways in which nationally based organisations evolve in theirhome countries and go on to shape broader transnational agendasfor ethical trade.     

Multi-stakeholder approaches to ethical trade: towards a reorganisation of UK retailers' global supply chains?

As a result of consumer campaigns and media exposure of poorworking conditions at sites of export production, retailersare under heightened pressure to organise their global supplychains more responsibly. This paper critically evaluates thework of the UK's Ethical Trading Initiative in responding tothis pressure, both strategically and in practice. It is arguedthat for ethical trading strategy to make a more significantdifference to the organisation of global supply chains, attentionneeds to be paid to the terms of trade between retailers andsuppliers, as well as to issues of worker welfare at sites ofproduction.     

Observations On State Trading in the Russian Economy

The paper presents an overview of state trading activities in Russia in light of that country's prospective accession to the World Trade Organization. The authors cover the origins of Russian state trading, developments after the collapse of the USSR, state involvement in barter trade, and its control of the organizational structure and remaining monopolies; they also attempt to estimate the government's share in Russia's foreign trade turnover in 1996 and mid-1997. A discussion of implications embraces issues relating to the inefficiencies of state trading and Russia's designation as a nonmarket economy by the United States and the countries of the European Union. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F13, F14, K33, N20, P33. 1 table, 20 references.     

Regionalizing global trade patterns, 1981–2001: application of a new method

This paper investigates the establishment of trading regions in the global economy at the national level using a measure of trade intensity and a regional assignment algorithm that generates economically meaningful trading regions. Although there is definite regionalization in the global economy with regard to international trade, there is no evidence of an increase in the concentration of that regionalization over time. The geography of international trade is incredibly dynamic, with change related to political, historical and economic forces. Overall, trading regions have relatively few members and are increasingly a set of geographically close countries.     

Den samiska handeln och dess roll som social differentieringsfaktor‐lule lappmark 1760–1860

English summary

During the beginning of the 17th Century, reindeer‐husbandry developed as the dominating economic form of the Sami in Swedish Lappland. Sami society was transformed from a hunting to a pastoralist society, with profound alterations in social and economic structures. In this paper the role of trade as an agent of change in reindeer‐pastoralist economies is studied with an emphasis on conditions in Lule lappmark during the period 1760–1860.

In the middle of the 18th Century, the Sami held a dominating position in the trade of Lule lappmark. Sami traded with the Swedish trading system on the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, and with the Norwegian trading system on the Atlantic coast. Through this trade, the Sami both disposed of their own reindeer products and conducted important middle‐man trade between the two national trading systems. In addition they carried out a large local trade in Lapland with their own products and with purchased goods.

By the middle of the 19th Centuy. the picture is completely different. The dominating Sami position had been lost and trade with Norway all but disappeared. The initiative in the local trade had gone over to the settlers. All this had occured without any changes in the assortment of goods, trading‐patterns, the volume of trade or prices. The reasons where manifold. The most important ones, however, are to be found in the population development of Lapland and the increase in population and production on the coast of Bothnia.

In Lapland a strong population movement occured with the change from a traditional Sami way of life towards a more settled one based on agriculture. At the same time, the number of settlers with a Swedish ethnic background vigourosly increased. On the coast of Bothnia the population tripled between 1750 and 1850. During this period an important proto‐industrial development also took place based on wood and iron, wind‐ and water‐power. All this meant that the relative importance of traditional Sami goods received from reindeer‐husbandry diminished, even if actual supply and demand remained stable.

The great volume of trade with reindeer‐products and the many important goods received in return demonstrates the importance of trade for the reindeer‐pastoralist economy. The trading‐goods were to a large extent technically superior to the products produced within the frames of the reindeer‐pastoralist economy. The most important factor was, however, the fact that the surplus production left in exchange for these goods, only demanded a small increase in labor input.

Within the reindeer‐pastoralist society, trade has a role as promotor of property‐differentiation and social stratification. Through hoarding of silver the rich reindeer‐owner could withdraw a substantial part of his property from the eternal plague of reindeer‐pastoralism ‐ the ever occuring bad years with heavy losses of reindeer. After such a year, he could use the silver to buy food, saving his diminished herd from slaughter and quickly building it up again. The owner of a small herd, without any silver, had to slaughter the few reindeer that survived in order to live; hence social differences could be conserved over generations.     

饭店企业组织伦理氛围对组织承诺的影响研究

近年来,组织伦理氛围与组织承诺之间的相关性研究备受研究者关注。我国大陆关于饭店企业组织伦理氛围对组织承诺影响的研究非常少见。本研究主要以安徽、福建、湖南、四川、河南等地的9家三星级以上饭店为样本,采取问卷调查方法,利用结构方程模型软件定量分析了饭店企业组织伦理氛围对组织承诺的影响。据此提出了改善饭店企业组织伦理氛围与提升员工组织承诺的对策建议。     

民国时期祁门红茶贷款案与银企关系的建立--关于上海金融资本对周边产业经济之控制

祁门红茶与上海交通银行贷款关系的成立 ,标志着农业产品的生产与销售活动受到金融资本的支配与控制。而在战前区域经济关系中 ,也说明中国内陆地区农业产品的生产者与贸易组织同沿海出口口岸的关系更为密切。本文重点考察作为中国出口大宗产品的祁门红茶与银行银企关系建立的过程、原因 ,及其金融支配与控制关系对于出口产品生产与销售的影响 ,以期说明农业产业组织的变迁与沿海及内陆区域经济关系形成问题。     

中国电子机械制造业出口产品贸易网络研究——基于产品内分工与贸易视角

在区分中间/最终产品、一般/加工贸易后，描述了中国电子机械制造业出口产品贸易网络，并探讨了出口经验和产品关联如何影响企业进入网络从事出口和拓展优势贸易伙伴。结果表明：①出口地、目的国、出口地-目的国维度出口经验和产品关联可以显著地促进4种电子机械制造业产品企业进入特定贸易网络进行出口。②在位出口企业扩展优势伙伴方面，出口地-目的国维度出口经验对4种企业均有促进作用；目的国出口经验、出口地产品关联的促进作用集中在中间产品企业；出口地出口经验则集中在一般贸易企业。     

Stewards of Virtue? The Ethical Dilemma of CSR in African Agriculture

In recent years companies have responded to increasingly powerful consumer politics by expanding the scope of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to include ethical trade. This article examines the ethic embedded in and promulgated through ethical trade by use of a case study of African agriculture. Building on recent conceptualizations of globalization, neoliberalism and anthropological analyses of the audit economy, the authors put forward three inter‐related arguments. First, that there is a clear, if largely unacknowledged, ethic that positions ethical trade as an inherently neo‐utilitarian response to the economic and political imperatives of globalization, with important implications for its intended beneficiaries in the South and advocates in the North. Second, that this ethic is at the core of a form of governmentality that advances the project of neoliberalism, not by force but rather through the technologies and embedded norms of voluntary regulation, resulting in a model of governance that is fundamentally constrained by structurally embedded limitations. And third, that attempts to remove these limitations may be less likely to achieve the democratic, empowering outcomes of ethical trade's proponents than to serve the interests of the internationally dispersed ‘stewards of virtue’ that grant ethical trade its legitimacy.     

Economic interdependence and international interactions: the impact of country size on political conflict and cooperation

The trade–conflict model claims that one state, designated as the ‘actor’, is deterred from initiating conflict against a trading partner, designated as the ‘target’, for fear of losing the welfare gains associated with trade. This article extends the trade–conflict model to examine the effect of country size on the trade gains among countries. We derive three propositions with regard to international interactions that pertain to the links between trade, conflict and country size. These hypotheses all imply that a country with an improvement in its terms of trade with a large country will decrease conflict more than it would with an improvement in its terms of trade with a small country. A 30‐country sample from the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) is used for empirical tests. The empirical analyses support the derived hypotheses. The model predicts that a country's ability to influence domestic consumption in a trading partner is an important determinant of international interactions.     

The Trade of Traditional Chinese Medicine Materials in Hankou from 1872 to 1919

The inter-port trade of traditional Chinese medicinal (TCM) materials dominated business structure in Hankou in 1872 to 1919, while the transfer trade of TCM materials also played an important role. Before 1904, musk was the predominant trading medicinal material among all TCM materials traded in Hankou, followed by Rhus chinensis mill. In the modern times, Hankou ranked second only to Shanghai in China in terms of the trading volume of TCM materials, since Hankou enjoyed a pronounced growth momentum then. If we look at each TCM materials’ market size, trading routes, and trading volume among various inflow and outflow ports, we can see based on the Hankou TCM materials trading structure that although there were changes from 1872 to 1919, the TCM business network and market performances formed in Hankou since the Qing dynasty did not sustain any disastrous impact from national economic and social changes, and their original vitality had retained. This was primarily due to the huge market demand in modern Hankou, the TCM commodity characteristics and the developed domestic market trade network in modern China.     

对华贸易摩擦与我国对外贸易地理方向调整——基于收入需求偏好相似理论的分析

近来对华贸易摩擦数量更是呈现上升趋势。我国应该从贸易摩擦的国内原因着手,提升本国的国际竞争力。当前对华贸易摩擦与我国偏向性的对外贸易地理方向表现出重合性。要从根本上解决当前困境,就应该利用需求偏好相似理论逐步调整对外贸易方向,把原有的欧、美、日为主要导向出口贸易调整到各大洲并重的全球贸易战略。我国应特别注重拓展非洲、拉美市场,在缓解贸易摩擦危害的同时使中国走向贸易强国。     

Theory of Comparative Advantage: Do Transportation Costs Matter?

In this paper we present a formal analysis that incorporates returns to transportation into a Ricardian framework to predict trade patterns. The important point gained from this analysis is that increasing returns to transportation, coupled with appropriate distances between trading partners, can be shown to reverse Ricardian predictions even when there are no international differences in tastes, technology, or factor endowments. Additional gains from trade may emerge from reductions in aggregate delivery costs owing to scale economies.     

Reading fair trade: political ecological imaginary and the moral economy of fair trade foods

This paper begins to explore the changing political geographies of alternative development as practiced and envisioned in the global South. Looking specifically at the growing movement and market for fair trade foods, this form of alternative development has become the moral business of latte drinkers and other reflexive consumers in Europe and the US. Fair trade attempts to re-connect producers and consumers economically, politically, and psychologically through the creation of a transnational moral economy. This re-connection is accomplished through material and semiotic commoditization processes that produce fair trade commodities. The semiotic production of these commodities and their traffic in particular ‘political ecological imaginaries’ is essential to the formation of ethical production-consumption links, acting to also politicize consumption and fair trade eaters. Fair trade's moral economy rides the tension between the ethical relationships it fosters and the need for the wily characteristics of enterprise in the construction of transnational trade networks. Bringing recent work on moral geography to bear, constructing this moral economy is an attempt to facilitate a sense of ‘solidarity in difference’ in the experiences of global economic inequalities between North and South and growers and eaters. At the same time, fair trade networks look to produce an expansive ‘spatial dynamics of concern’ in the fashioning of ethical places of production and consumption. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the continuing dilemmas critical for fair trade and suggestions for further empirical study of fair trade provisioning and alternative development networks.     

Early medieval slave‐trading in the archaeological record: comparative methodologies

Efforts to identify archaeological indicators of slave‐trading have highlighted four main criteria: shackles, fortified settlements, currency, and burials. However, little effort has been made to examine these indicators together for the early medieval period. By comparing finds, studies, and methodologies from the two major slave‐trading regions of Britain and Ireland and Slavic east central Europe, it becomes clear that these so‐called ‘indicators’ for slave‐trading are inconclusive, and textually attested slave‐trading can remain archaeologically invisible. To better understand slave‐trading in the seventh to eleventh centuries, historians and archaeologists should instead focus on its context within general trade.     

A trade balance: litigation and negotiation in the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement system

The establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been widely accepted as representing the legalisation of world trading rules. However, it is important to reflect on the limits of this legalisation thesis in terms of the interface between international and domestic policy processes. By locating trading disputes in a political analysis of policy implementation, it is argued that it is difficult to establish conceptually how the WTO dispute settlement system could have authority separate from and above the conventional international politics of trade policy relations. Instead, the article argues that case outcomes should be expected to be largely the product of domestic political institutions and policy processes, and how these intersect with developments in the WTO dispute settlement system. Brief studies of the Australian government's dispute settlement strategy and two high-profile WTO disputes—the US upland cotton and European Union sugar cases—serve to suggest that the authority of international trade law is not as significant as assumed by the legalisation thesis. Rather, domestic politics and institutions have an important impact on the outcome of trade disputes.     

CANADA'S INDUSTRIAL PERFORMANCE AND PROSPECTS UNDER FREE TRADE

Canada is currently involved in renegotiating its tariffs in the present discussions on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt). Although official policy seems to be cast in terms of sectoral tariff cuts, reflecting Canada's trading strengths and weaknesses, there has been strong advocacy by some economists that Canada should enter free-trade agreements with the United States or preferably on a multilateral basis (Daly and Globerman, 1976; Economic Council of Canada, 1975; Wonnacott, 1975). The recent books advocating free trade are persuasive in mood and argument but their authors follow "the established orthodoxy of most economists in this country over the past two decades: foreign investment is, of itself, not a problem except to the jaundiced eye of the (nationalist) beholder. The tariff is the real villain … There are no problems, in this view that a good dose of free trade and free capital markets will not cure" (Rotstein, 1972, 2). So, we are faced with a paradox: on the one hand some economists, including those working for the Economic Council, are strongly committed to the argument that free trade will lead to manufacturing success for Canada while on the other hand the nation is experiencing its worst negative balance for secondary manufactured goods. Canada's trading partners have indicated increasingly that Canada does not produce finished goods of the type they require at attractive prices. This anti-export syndrome is a product of the high exchange value of the Canadian dollar (till early 1977) and the high basic cost of Canadian goods.     

England’s trade with the Continent in the early thirteenth century: customs and the port of Dover

ABSTRACT

This article identifies and prints the earliest detailed customs list from northern Europe, which was prepared for the port of Dover in 1233 or soon after, and it gives fuller and more detailed information about trade than for any other northern European port at this date. The list shows a remarkable diversity of trade, including some of the earliest references to particular goods in English documents, and widespread sources of trade including Flanders, Germany and Italy. The depiction of such trading links prompts questions about the ‘commercial revolution’ and the development of European trade, for it shows how varied trade and consumption could be in the era of the fairs of the Champagne towns, before the establishment of direct maritime links from the Italian cities to northern Europe. The appearance of commodities and trading links in the Dover list suggest that commercial development was earlier and more evolutionary.     

晚清中国商业行会对洋商的“停交”抵制活动——基于经济和法律的视角

晚清时期,在中西商贸领域,频频出现由华商商业行会倡导的对洋商的"停交"抵制活动.该种抵制活动,通常源于洋商破坏商事惯例及交易则例、赖欠货款、欺行霸市等损坏华商利益的行为,有时也因华洋商人分割市场、侵夺商利的市场竞争而起.它其实是一种扩大化的华洋商事纠纷形态,在特定历史背景下也成为华洋商事纠纷的一种独特解决路径.而其在中西商务交往过程中的实践和运作,从经济层面来看,是当时中国被强行融入资本主义世界经济体系过程中华洋市场仇恨的一种表征;从法律层面来看,则是中国商人藉本土商事习惯法与洋商进行斗争的一种自救行为.     

SPATIAL EFFECTS OF TRADE POLICY: EVIDENCE FROM BRAZIL*

ABSTRACT Does trade policy shape a country's internal economic geography? Empirical evidence on the spatial effects of trade policy in developing countries is limited. This paper contributes to this literature by looking at the experience of Brazil over the 1990s. In particular, an econometric analysis of the determinants of industrial location using data on regional manufacturing employment as well as data on several region and industry characteristics over the period 1990–1998 is performed. Estimation results suggest that trade openness favored location in states closer to the largest neighbor trading partner and that this effect increased through the end of the 1990s.